This week, I was at the wonderful Indie Connect. At the end was a game jam, and that’s where I started the following game for the theme “Treason”:

Arena fights are dangerous.

But at least you can trust your partner, right? Right?

To be on the safe side though, you took
some Vampiric Throwing Knives with you.
The arena rules prohibit the use
of weapons against your opponents,
but there is no mention that you
can’t use any if your partner acts up…

Collect power orbs to boost your antigravity!
Shove your opponents off the platform!

Win as a team or alone.

After all, if YOU kill your friend,
at least their power is safe with you, isn’t it?

Next jam! The plan was to make a little game and spent the remaining time with a university assignment like a responsible person. Then “Dark Science” was chosen as a theme, so I was like “I got to get my priorities straight” and concentrated solely on making this little gem:

Monster Pit

In the current economy, teamwork is all!

The mad scientist’s way to find the best monster for the
job is (obviously) to chain two of them together and throw
them in a pit with fireballs and other monsters.

Each of you is one of these monsters.
Work together and win as a team!

The game was made in about 8 hours (plus about 1 hour later adding the small stuff, like a new font, a mute functionality and a bit of bugfixing) at the Berlin Mini Game Jam together with Norbert Haacks who contributed his artistic talent and game designer wisdom to our endeavour. Special thanks to Jana Leinweber who inspired the trails idea with a comment while playtesting early on!

I’m very pleased with how this one turned out. The trail-mechanic makes the game a lot more tactical than just pushing the ball around, and the game favors the loser increasingly more, making comebacks possible: You have to push the candy on the ground of the other player – but that ground will start to shrink in the process, giving you increasingly less space to work with.

Apart from our own result, the jam set records – when I counted midway in, we had 35 people working enthusiastically on their own games! That’s the most we ever had in the years we are organizing the jam, but then again, the number seems to be consistently rising. And the atmosphere at the presentations at the end is simply amazing! Iwan Gabovitch will make a blog post later at our blog, and there will probably be a video too.

You get 2 points for scoring a goal, and 1 point if the opponent hits his own goal.

Normally only the hammers can hit the ball – but if the ball is red, the blue player can hit it once, and vice versa.

This is the first game I ever started with Python, featuring Pygame and pybox2d. Lovely language! It is also the first game that I ever made that uses any serious form of physics.

Both are thanks to Florian Berger, who is teaching the university course that got me started on making a Python game featuring any form of physics in the first place. Thanks a lot, it was great fun and (obviously, see above) had great results!

Sneakball is played in 2 teams of 2 players each – and each team only has one gamepad, with one stick for each character. Coordination is key, and the game is more strategic than it looks like at first glance. You can pick up the white data packets by colliding with them. If you pick one up, it’ll have your color for a second and is immune from being stolen before it turns white again. Let the balls touch your satellites (the two things emerging from the base) to score.

As some of you might know, I’m studying International Media and Computing, which includes a course called “Media Programming” – and for all I know, it might also be named “Game Programming”, because that’s we what did there. I like my studies more and more!

This monday was the presentation of the games we made over the last two months. Ours is a Beat’em up. It’s rather generic due to time constraints (after all this wasn’t the only project we had to make in the last months) and the absense of a game designer, but I learned a lot about 3d programming and XNA while developing, and it’s fun to play anyway!

The Game

Our final game is about obtaining as many bubbles as you can! You can do this by just peacefully collecting them, as there are many, but soon there won’t be – and then you have to dash at other players and hit them so they drop their bubbles and you (and everyone else, hurry!) can collect them. An interesting (and deceptive) mechanic is that you can go off-screen so that you don’t show, and while hidden, wander, so you deceive players about your real position – and suddenly jump out and get them! Furthermore, you can teleport a few times to the other part of the screen, and doing this while being hidden outside of the screen is a good method to sneak up on the others! (If you have read the post before: There are no alliances anymore, and there is only one kind of ball to collect.)

I suggest you download the version in the “Installation Notes” below, because there are a few bugs fixed – but well, we won’t take down our 48h-state, it is also highly playable. :)

Your graphics card needs to support Shader 3.0 to play this game, and it is optimized to be played with Xbox 360 controllers. If you don’t have them, download it anyway, it even makes fun without them!

The game is written in C#, with XNA as framework.

Oh, and by the way, here is a Zino Zini wallpaper:

The Team

And here’s our team again, for those of you who skipped the other way-too-lengthy post:

What will be added soon

A score screen!

A test for Shader 2.0 (yes, 2.0. We want to make it run on 2.0, so stay tuned if you don’t support 3.0!)

Actually, we wanted to add a bunch of other stuff, for example but not limited to: A Splash Start Screen showing our splendid logo (om.nomnom games), a start menu, a credits page, preferences (sound/music on/off), a different mode without time limit, and and and… but time ran out, and since it is playable in the current state, we will only add the things named above for sure.

PS: If you ask where there key, the monkey or the donkey is, well… that is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and therefore hard to find. (There is none. It got lost somewhere along the way of the development process, and afterwards we felt the game is too much fun to try to press a constraint in there. Earlier the balls collecting the bubbles should’ve become monkeys, but that wouldn’t go with the fine abstract look it has now.)